I know you're wondering why you ask such stupid questions, but your ignorance is acceptable. All year the gaming press had led you to think that there were only a few PC games coming out this year that mattered. This is the year of the big-name sequels, after all, and so unless you kept your ear very close to the ground, you probably didn't hear all that much about Far Cry, a first-person shooter developed by an obscure German developer, Crytek, and published by a company that's become one of the best publishers in the world, Ubi Soft. Your friends might have mentioned that they saw this new game that had really good water effects or this new game that was supposed to have this really good graphics engine, but all of the Far Cry news seemed to get buried under tales of stolen source code and unfortunate delays. Fortunately, the only news that matters is that Far Cry is the most important PC game released in years and you have to buy it.

You'll also probably need a powerful graphics card to go with it, too. Far Cry is the first FPS to really push the limits of modern PCs, and so the only guy on the block that'll be able to run it properly is that really nerdy guy who lives with his parents and has the red neon all over his tower. Lucky you.

When I say beautiful, I don't mean the newborn child or the woman you love kind of beauty. I mean the kind that lasts and that matters and doesn't throw up on you. Standing-on-a-watchtower-and-looking-out-on-the-best-water-effects-ever-created kind of love. Far Cry gives and then gives some more and it never asks anything in return except to be loved, and love it you will. From the moment you shoot an enemy in the head and see actual entrance and exit holes, you will learn what true affection is all about. When you're crawling along a beach that looks like a real beach, when you throw a grenade and instead of an odd-looking black stain it actually throws sand and leaves a pit, when you're looking out across the island and see a real horizon, my friend, you'll feel the love your mother never gave you. Every character in the game is fleshed out and moves realistically and every environment is gorgeous and filled with a real sense of tension. You may even find yourself looking for a texture out of place or a bitmap that they cut corners on and you'll never find it. Far Cry is the most graphically perfect game out there right now. Palm trees look like palm trees, people look like people, and shnozberries taste like shnozberries.

What good is a person who looks like a person but acts like a robot, though? Besides as a wife or girlfriend, I mean. Luckily, Crytek gave this game the strong bones it needs to hold up its gorgeous supermodel skin. The AI is actually I - they will seek cover and call for reinforcements, and the gameplay is as solid as a German woman's bicep. Sure, the controls are standard "WASD" FPS controls, but they're accurate and responsive and they give me a special tingle all over. Whether you're laying prone or sneaking slowly through the underbrush, it just feels right, and no attack or weapon is ever useless. Just when you think you'll never really use a grenade, you'll come across a group of enemies that you probably don't want to fight nose to nose, and as soon as you think that the machete you've been carrying is useless, you'll find someone rushing you and yes, it will be a gun in his pocket.

Speaking of guns, Far Cry is all about the guns. Sure you can sneak around and try not to be seen, but shooting someone in the face is what any self-respecting FPS boils down to. You've got your usual knife, pistol, shotgun, assault rifle, and sniper rifle, etc., and luckily the developers were smart enough to make them all useful. The sniper rifle is handled much like it is in a game like Counter-Strike, where you're given a few preset zooms and you just scroll between them, which cuts down on the time it takes to make someone out there a polygon widow. For the more sadistic among you, there's also a fine assortment of grenades: smoke, flash, frag, and rock. Yes, you can throw rocks at people or as distractions. Also, you need to see the flash grenade effect in this game. It's too beautiful for words.

Surely by now you're saying to yourself that it all sounds too perfect. The story has to suck or it has to have horrendous load times to ruin your fun. Of course, you're wrong, but I still love you anyway. Aside from one long loading time as you begin each session, there's virtually no loading. Everything is fed into the memory on the fly and you'll never notice it until you run into a brief loading screen between areas.

Cut scenes are few and far between and kept short, but they're enough to keep you abreast of what you've gotten yourself into, which isn't clear at first. You're Jack Carver, an ex-CIA operative and the boat you were sailing on was blown to quite a few pieces as you got too close to a desert island. A mysterious fellow guides you from area to area via a communicator and you're looking for the woman who hired you and your boat, and who is now missing. That's all. It doesn't sound like much of a story at all, but believe me when I say that it becomes quite compelling and provides for a lot of tension, which is exactly what's going to keep you hooked on this game.

Indoors or outdoors, you're going to be hanging on every single sound. The ambient music builds just perfectly whenever there's a sense of urgency and the voice acting and dialogue fit the action-movie theme of the game very well. It all goes towards building a sense of urgency and anxiety that most games only dream of. Far Cry is the kind of game that'll make you jump when you hear a guard who you didn't see, or when some other monstrosity jumps out at you from behind a door. The sound, graphics, story, and setting blend together to make an experience that's even better than it's outstanding parts. It's just that immersive.

Think that's all? No way. There's also a multiplayer game here, but it's sadly the weakest part of the experience. Only Team Deathmatch, Free for All, and Assault modes are available, and they can only be played on maps that are too large and too few; although, I'd guess that there's someone out there just waiting to make a mod that'll bring the multiplayer experience up to par. That, along with limited interactivity with the environment (not everything breaks when you shoot it and not everything is as reactive as it could be) is all the ill that I have to speak about Far Cry, and I feel guilty even saying that much.

I'm not lying to you when I say that this game is a work of art. It's a beautiful experience that no one with a decent computer should be deprived of, and it's times like these that the PC gaming community is fortunate to have such a good word-of-mouth system, since it would be a shame to see a game like this get overlooked in favor of games that might not even see the light of day this year. Go out and buy it, right now, and you can thank me later.

· · · Derek Durham